INTRODUCTION

The Olympus XA is a compact 35mm film rangefinder made in Japan by Olympus between 1979 and 1985.

BEST SUITED FOR:

Travel

Street

Fun!

PERSONAL NOTES

Olympus is well known for making excellent cameras in very small packages. The Olympus XA is another example, as it is the smallest 35mm film rangefinder camera ever made.

The design is excellent, the lens is super sharp, the camera is easily pocketable, it feels like the Lomo LC-A in terms of compactness, ease of use, and fun, but with much better optics and more options.

The XA has a small finder, which includes a rangefinder. The focus is done by moving a lever on the bottom of the lens, and looking in the rangefinder, easy and precise enough for the integrated lens it has.

The lens produces very sharp images, especially if you stop down the aperture a few stops, but it's still quite capable of rendering details at large apertures too.

The exposure control works in aperture priority. You set the aperture with the multi position switch on the left side of the lens, then the camera calculates the proper exposure time that goes with it. The ISO setting is easily set on the front of the lens.

On the bottom plate, you can find a multi position switch where you can test the battery, and a backlight setting. This setting will tell the shutter to add 1.5 stop to the exposure, making it easy to expose in backlight situations. This is a very nice feature found on some other Olympus cameras.

One thing you will have to be careful about the XA is its shutter button. It is -extremely- sensible. As soon as you finger touches it, the photo is taken. You have to get use to this when using the XA, you will probably loose a few frames because of that. But in the end, I found it to be an advantage and would like other cameras to be like this one.

Another thing: the shutter is close to silent. Another advantage there.

And again, this camera does not attract any eyes, it looks like on old cheap thing from the 80s that no one cares about. Again, another advantage for street photography!

I love the XA, I used it for many months, mostly for street photography, I had a lot of fun with it.

CONCLUSION

I love the XA, if you want a 35mm film camera for street photography and more, this is a solid contender. It does not look like much, but don't be deceived by its appearance, it packs lots of features for its size.

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